A Good Death, Many Times Over

By Susan Von Der Haar

Jacqueline Williams thought she knew everything about her parents’ lives, but she was dead wrong. Stuck unwittingly in the past and razor focused on her parents’ shortcomings, she has let their personal narratives define her and almost lead to her own undoing.

Until one day when a stranger crosses her path and sets her on an alternative course. It is during a visit with an old family friend that she takes part in a reenactment of history that uncovers disturbing events from long ago and along the way, reveals surprises about Jaqueline’s parents and the many lives that they crisscrossed.

A Good Death, Many Times Over is Susan Von Der Haar’s second book. Susan has spent the last 40 years listening to stories as a licensed psychotherapist in Canada and the United States. A big part of her work is to help people to understand and re-write more authentic lives.

This book was inspired by a true story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Susan Von Der Haar
• Release date: Jul 19, 2022
• ISBN: 9781777867539

Book preview

1.png

A Good Death,

Many Times Over

This is a work of fiction.

Names, characters, locales or

events in this novel are derived

from the author’s imagination.

Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,

is coincidental.

Copyright © 2022 Susan Von Der Haar.

ISBN 978-1-7778675-2-2 (Print)

ISBN 978-1-7778675-3-9 (E-book)

A Good Death,

Many Times Over

Susan Von Der Haar

How easily we forget—we,

in the business of storytelling—

that life was the point all along.

A mother who has vanished, a father who has failed,

a brother who is determined.

A journey into the city by means of a boxcar

with a vagabond named Ulysses.

Lincoln Highway: A Novel, Amor Towles

With John in mind

Prologue

A Good Death,

Many Times Over

I was born at home on Christmas Day in 1951, just as the sun pinched the sky pink. I was instantly branded Mercy-Mild by my great Aunt Catherine, who assisted with the delivery. My aunt was a force unto herself—champion of my father’s interests and family ancestry, retired nurse by vocation, midwife by avocation, and maker of namesake baby quilts. She literally sang me into the world with Hark! The Herald Angels Sing.

Already waiting on the bedroom bureau was a baby quilt with Mercy-Mild embroidered on it. While I rested in my mother’s arms, Catherine reminded her that traditionally, Williams were named after ancestors and she sincerely hoped that my mother would consider calling me Mercy-Mild, the name of a Williams who had been a nurse in the American Civil War. However, if she decided not to, that would be all right too. However, even in those early years of her marriage, my mother knew it would not be ‘all right too" and she would never hear the end of it. Rather than protest, my mother, after 19 hours of labour, accepted to consider it, and later, more rested, compromised in the spirit of pleasing the Williams family. I was named Jacqueline-Mercy.

Moving forward, my mother regretted this concession and exclusively called me Jackie, while my aunt called me Mercy-Mild, and my father called me Jack to express his disappointment that I was not a boy. Emily and Shirley Ann arrived in short succession after my birth, but at increasingly high risk to my mother’s health. After three risky pregnancies, the birth of Shirley Ann resulted in my mother remaining in the hospital for one month with eclampsia. It was precisely on the day of her discharge that my father made the fatal error of saying, Perhaps the fourth will be a boy? My mother took colossal exception to his remark, and ended her years of childbearing on the spot. She insisted on taking birth control pills and launched into long, and loud arguments with him on his valuation of men over women. To me, it seemed like my mother became a women’s rights crusader overnight, but nothing really happens like that. There is always a slow opaque burn somewhere. However, as my father pulled back from her barrage, I worked even more assiduously to get his attention. I just could not pinpoint what I had done so wrong to be dismissed from his sphere, except, as my mother contended, I had been born a girl.

But I now understand that feelings evolve after many hours of unspoken words–not the words you hear in shouting matches. No, it is those words which flood our minds when it is too late to stop our ire and they burst out. These were not my words, but words of resentment and mistrust that coursed through my mother, on endless sleepless nights. Yet she did not want to divorce my father and he did not want to be divorced. She believed in her marriage vows as if they were disembodied from her real life experience and vowed to see her children grown and independent before she considered an alternative course. However, when that did happen and my sisters and I were all teachers with jobs, it was too late. Mother had built a world that could not give way to a dramatic change. For there are moments that are better for change than others. Besides, there was peace in the house and a strange level of contentment between my parents, even if it had not been easy for her, or for us. I was raised in not understanding why we lived the way we did. It was Charity Sigel who told me that my father had been seeing other women during my mother’s pregnancies. She wanted me to know that she told him, at that time, that she did not agree with his behaviour. But I knew nothing of this at that time, because I was a child, playing with my sisters in bucolic fields in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania and learning the importance of hallowed ground from Charity and Aunt Catherine, our summer mothers, who taught us how to bake bread in a stone oven and to fish in the local ponds. Those were good years. And I have since learned that the good and the bad can happen at the same time. It was not until Charity told me about my father’s affairs that I began to question my sanity, because I remembered those years as moments when I felt deep pride in being called my father’s tomboy and even sharing in parts of his routine, like hiking with him in the fields through the morning fog—in spite of being a girl. However, I do remember when that changed. When I turned eleven, the clock struck midnight and everything changed, because I changed—and my hips began to widen and I grew breasts and I felt banished to the attic. Slowly, like a car pulling away, I watched my father fade through the rear back window. The doors on his study closed and the open oak shelves that housed the classics and the adventure stories were suddenly out of my reach, until the day that he died. And the day he died, I threw them open wide again, and reclaimed the room, where he had once said he was a pirate and together we had drawn a map to treasure island.

When the arguing stopped between my parents, my father and mother began to carve out worlds of their own, which my sister and I tried to straddle. It seemed to come so naturally to my sisters who rarely saw a need to ask questions, but I always wanted answers.

In a home where there is no transparency, uncertainty reins. One becomes easily confused, and in my case, I finally stopped asking. What did I really know for certain? My mother’s world was art; and my father’s world was history and they had three daughters and my father was disappointed that he did not have a son–ostensibly to continue the Williams line.

Freed from the constraints of having more children, my mother regained her health, and had moved into a large attic space in our home which was engorged with sunlight by ten o’clock every morning. This was her domain; it was her art studio and she painted large, bold canvases that she sold to people in other cities. The space had a circular staircase to the garden out back and her artist friends gravitated to it when they visited. Part art studio, partly to receive friends, it was a magical place that she shared with us. I do not remember if my father ever visited us upstairs, although it was just two floors above his study. My parents lived by different unspoken rules. Both were free to do whatever they chose to do, with discretion.

For my father’s part, he continued to take me and my sisters to Gettysburg, every summer, where he would lecture, research and oversee reenactment events. This was a world of garrulous costumed people bent on reenacting the past. To a child it was an endless green space for adventures. We were encouraged to roam the town and the nearby fields. My father still did not talk much with us, but there were others who did, and we had each other. We stayed at The Sigel Guest House, summer after summer and it came to feel like a second home. My Aunt Catherine often joined us, and we had a different life there. It was like having a second family. When summer ended, we packed up and returned home to a new school year.

This was a tween time of tugging and pulling at how to resume the charade of being a family, eating all of our meals together and attending the Arch Street Meeting House on Sundays.

We girls were the ham and cheese of my parents ٥٦ year marriage. And although there might have been contempt on my mother’s part, she did not openly express it. As the years passed, the arguments completely stopped. My father continued to boast about my mother’s art sales while feigning to be clueless about their relationship. He buried himself in his work while our mother held art salons upstairs and introduced herself as the wife of a prominent war historian at the University of Pennsylvania, which she was. Their marriage was disembodied. When my parents became too old and brittle to play at the game, we no longer were expected to eat together or attend church services as a family.

Like two planets that had once been close for a brief time, then bounced soundly apart, my parents were now careening wildly and alone in their own orbits. They were singular in their own domains, except where my sisters and I intersected them. For ten grueling years, we ran upstairs to care for my mother and then ran downstairs to care for my father. When my father was still able to walk, he would leave the house by the front door at ٩ a.m., circle the house to a side gate and enter the garden. He had a special chair, pond-side, where he would sit patiently for ٤٥ minutes and feed a large turtle named Wally. And my mother, never needing to look at a clock, would leave the house precisely at ١ p.m. by the back staircase into the garden, hug the path closest to the house, exit by the same side gate, circle the house and walk to the end of the street and back.

I used to wonder if they missed each other, but finally accepted that their division was too deep and had never really healed. When he died, my mother already had advanced dementia so she did not react when I told her. She simply asked if we intended to take in another lodger? Yes, father had become a total stranger to her. Two years later, she died. Both left us each a substantial inheritance, but something crashed in me, while my sisters, true to their natures, like beautiful birds released from a cage, flew away. I sunk into despair.

In those months after my father died, my mother languished under a veil of dementia. And I just sat in my father’s study, in his oversized, red leather chair and stared at the books on the open shelves for hours. Perhaps I had already begun going mad. My sisters did not dare to disturb me. I simply could not forget the days when these doors had been closed on me, and now they were completely open. Six months later, totally unaware of who I was, my mother died and I suddenly owned the house. I walked from room to room, but always ended up in the study, while my sisters packed and imagined their futures.

At first, I wondered why the sole ownership of the home was left to me? Initially, I told myself that my father had set a trap to hold me back, a veritable hostage to his legacy, but when my sisters surrendered their house keys to me, I knew this was not possible. Self-discovery begins where you are at, not where you have